The Long Result (8 page)

‘Good evening to you,’ he said pleasantly.

There was a chorus of rather nervous answers. Then, solemnly, Janna got to her feet, all ten-year-old again. She walked up to the visitor and gazed at him in silent wonder.

‘Are you a
real
Regulan?’ she demanded at last.

I glanced at Patricia with a smile. But she wasn’t smiling – her expression was positively frozen. I took it for granted
she was afraid Janna’s behaviour might offend the alien.

Not a bit of it. The long head simply cocked to one side, and Anovel agreed gravely, ‘Yes, I am. Are you a real girl?’

Everybody laughed, Patricia joining in a little late, and the moment of tension passed. Jacky introduced Madeleine and the rest of us, then went to the liquor console.

‘Do you take alcohol, Anovel?’ he inquired.

‘It doesn’t affect us as it does you, but I like the flavour of your red wine. Can I have some of that?’

‘Certainly!’ Jacky found and filled a glass, covering his own nervousness with an excess of flourishes. ‘Tell me,’ he went on as he offered the drink, ‘what do you use if you want to forget your cares – a nice bowl of nitric acid?’

‘I’m afraid we have no equivalent of intoxication,’ Anovel answered with a marvellous imitation of a chuckle. ‘Perhaps the nearest might be what we call darboonja – a fluorine-carbon compound we use to heighten the visual memory.’

‘Won’t you sit down?’ Madeleine murmured, offering a chair.

‘Thank you, but my knees bend the wrong way for your furniture. I shall be more comfortable on the floor.’ He chose a spot near the liquor console and dropped in a single complex motion to a relaxed squatting posture. Janna settled beside him and excitedly demanded that he tell her what it was like where he came from.

After that, all other conversation died a sudden death. Everyone gazed at the long, graceful head of the Regulan poised at a quizzical angle on the heavily maned neck. Finally Janna was persuaded to circle the room and say good night. Watching her reluctant progress to her bedroom, Jacky chuckled.

‘She’ll be boasting about meeting you all next week at school!’ he told Anovel, who gave his strange, rather sad-looking smile in reply. It crossed my mind that at least you
weren’t likely to find a Stars Are For Man League among Janna’s classmates.

After that we all enjoyed Madeleine’s marvellous food, including Anovel, who explained that – as with wine – though he derived little nourishment from Terran dishes he liked the exotic flavours. It had been established long ago that a Regulan’s metabolism could cope with the ingestion of virtually any carbon-based organic substance, and several which weren’t carbon-based. Anovel had explained that a rocket crash wasn’t likely to do him much damage – for that, you’d need a nuclear explosion. It looked as though poisoning him was equally out of the question.

Later there was music from Jacky’s fine collection of tapes, and the evening slid into a mellow haze. During a lull, I glanced around for Patricia, but she wasn’t to be seen; I assumed she’d gone into the garden, for the doors were open to the mild spring night and a bird was singing. I felt great. The liquor had taken care of all my former tension. I considered setting off in search of Patricia, but then a casual remark caught my attention and I leaned forward on my chair.

‘What time is it?’ someone had asked.

I was making to consult my watch, but Anovel answered readily, ‘It’s just gone twenty-three.’

Jacky gave him a puzzled glance. ‘Do you – ah – do you carry a watch?’

‘I don’t need one. You humans are the only race which uses them. Did you not know?’

‘That’s right,’ Helga spoke up. ‘All the other species we know operate at a constant subjective time-rate. Ours varies. Tell me, Anovel – I’ve been meaning to ask you. You aren’t here on Bureau business, are you? I don’t recall seeing your name on any of our lists.’

‘No, I’m making a private tour – a complete round of the
inhabited worlds. I was at Epsilon Eridani before this, and I plan to go on to Sigma Sagittarii.’

‘How can you do that?’ Madeleine asked in amazement.

‘I’m with what you call a “zoo ship”.’

Martin, her spacecrew cousin, chipped in. ‘We hire ships out to research foundations, and they provide transport between worlds for members of the various races with an itch to travel. In return, the passengers offer themselves for study wherever they stop. It’s a way of enabling scientists to get first-hand knowledge of other races’ metabolisms.’

‘I know someone who’s done that,’ I said. ‘A girl who went to study tectogenetics on Sigma Sagittarii.’

‘Mildred Bilinska?’ Helga inquired. ‘Yes, I know her too.’

‘Did she enjoy her trip?’ Anovel asked.

‘She said she’d had a fine time,’ I answered. ‘Of course, she was glad to give up living in a suit when she returned. But you Regulans are lucky that way – you aren’t bothered.’

Anovel used his marvellous imitation of a laugh again. ‘Yes, we’re very lucky in that respect.’

‘Surely it must take a long time to complete such a trip,’ Madeleine commented. ‘Isn’t it – well – difficult to spend so long away from home?’

The long head waved in a slow negative. ‘You see, we live much longer than you. The eight or ten years the trip will take is – you might say really a vacation.’

‘How long do you live, then?’ Jacky exclaimed.

‘At our natural rate – breathing fluorine, that is – twelve hundred of your years. Though since our subjective time is faster than yours, of course it seems even longer.’

‘And how old are you yourself – if it’s not a rude question?’ Jacky said.

‘On your scale, about two hundred. Quite a youngster yet!’

There was a stunned pause. Glancing around, I saw Patricia had reappeared and was sitting by herself on the other side of the room. Anovel drained his glass and rose.

‘Well, I have to be back at zoo by morning,’ he said. ‘I really must be going – no, I mean it!’ He gestured with all four arms to forestall Jacky’s objections, and departed amid a flurry of invitations to return as soon as possible.

‘That,’ Helga said to me dreamily, ‘is a lovely piece of design.’

‘What?’ I hadn’t quite seen the point.

‘Oh, Roald! Look, he can breathe fluorine, oxygen, chlorine or what-have-you with cheerful indifference. He can eat practically anything – and on top of that he lives twelve hundred years. A
lovely
piece of design!’

‘With all those natural advantages,’ sighed Martin van’t Hoff, ‘they ought to have discovered starflight instead of us.’ He gazed gloomily into the depths of his current drink.

At that point Patricia came over and sat on my knee, and for some while we paid no attention to the other people in the room. Finally she pulled away with a sigh.

‘I’m glad that thing’s gone,’ she murmured.

‘Why? Because I was paying attention to him instead of you?’ I grinned at her. ‘Don’t be silly, my sweet!’

She bit my ear casually. ‘What did he mean – he “had to be back at zoo”?’

‘Of course, you weren’t here when he explained.’ I told her about the zoo ship system, and finished thoughtfully, ‘You know, it might be fun to make a trip that way. Say to Regulus.’

She pulled away from me. ‘Roald, you can’t mean that!’

‘Why not?’ I was much drunker than I’d imagined. ‘I’d love to visit Regulus, and if there isn’t any other way…’

‘You mean you’d let yourself be turned into a lab specimen, poked and probed at by all sorts of—?’

The phone shrilled. I half saw Jacky unfold from his chair
to go and answer it, but all my attention was on Patricia – as usual. ‘Say you’re joking!’ she pleaded with intensity I couldn’t account for in my liquor-muzzy state.

‘Sure I’m joking,’ I soothed. ‘Think I could stand to be away from you all that time? Of course, if I could take you with me—’

She tore away from me and stood up facing my chair, all the colour draining from her face. My shock of bewilderment and words I had in mind to speak were cut short by a cry from Jacky.

‘Roald! Here – quickly, for heaven’s sake!’

The edge of terror on his voice rasped through my personal dismay. I muttered an apology to Patricia, leaving explanations for later, and hurried to the phone. On the screen was the scowling face of bin Ishmael.

‘Finally
we managed to locate somebody! I’ve been calling all over town trying to get hold of your boss, but he’s – Oh, the hell with that. You’ll have to do. Come on over here, and make it fast.

‘Someone’s tried to murder the Tau Cetians!’

The words seemed to explode in my mind like a bomb. They were no less of a shock to everyone else in the room, and a babble of incredulous exclamations followed. I struggled to absorb the horrible fact bin Ishmael had hurled at me, but long before I’d recovered Jacky had seized command of the situation. With a fierce roar he made everybody else shut up; then he fired some crisp questions at bin Ishmael, and rang off with a promise of immediate action.

‘Madeleine, get me and Roald a shot of antalc each, will you?’ he rapped. He threw off his evening tweed jacket and
replaced it with a casual day cape, shrugging it into place with the same movement that served to press the caller button for his car and bring it from the garage to the front door.

‘For me as well, please,’ Helga called, disengaging herself from Marin van’t Hoff, who had taken a great fancy to her. ‘It sounds as though I might be able to make myself useful.’

Madeleine brought three little glasses from the liquor console, brimming with anti-alcohol. I gulped mine down, and it felt in my guts as though I’d swallowed a cold breeze. Then I crossed the room to Patricia, who was ostentatiously ignoring me – gazing out into the garden with her lovely face set and expressionless.

‘Sweet, I hate to abandon you like this, but from what bin Ishmael said —’

‘Frankly,’ she cut in, ‘I don’t care.’

‘Patricia!’

‘Oh,
go
to your damned aliens if you must! Go and sublimate your feelings with them – or do they make you so much at home you don’t need to sublimate?’

The tone in which she delivered that ugliest of insults was the same she might have used in ordering ten minutes’ rain over Oregon.

I’d never imagined the day would come when I wanted to slap a woman’s face – least of all, that the woman would be Patricia. But I was raising my hand when Jacky’s sharp call from behind me broke in on my paralysing rage. The antalc gripped me, cleansing my mind, and I turned away, conscious only of an engulfing wave of despair.

As the car streaked down the night-bright streets of the city, none of us said very much. Helga kept her eyes on the backs of her strong, capable hands, flexing them together. She put several questions to me, which I answered as well as my
confusion would let me. At first it was irritating; then I remembered with dismay that thanks to my study of the Bureau file on Tau Cetians earlier today, I probably knew as much as anyone on Earth about them. I was glad I didn’t have to face the task confronting Helga and the other biochemists who would be called in. The Starhomers weren’t equipped to provide proper data on the aliens’ metabolism; the Ark staff hadn’t had time yet to accumulate their usual exhaustive knowledge, and as for the Tau Cetians themselves, if they were at a twentieth-century level their medicine was probably still half superstition.

In any case, according to bin Ishmael they were all five very ill indeed.

Jacky kept the car in emergency top. The scattering of other traffic we met gave us clear passage on seeing the Bureau sign blinking on and off behind the weaving antenna. It seemed little more than moments before we arrived at the Ark.

The confusion here was terrific. Lights had been slung on hastily-rigged poles around the entrance, and a police stop beacon brought us to a standstill among a crowd of running men and women. The noise of an emergency gas generator formed a humming background to the shouting of frantic orders. Either side of the entrance, police cars were parked; farther away, two rescue teams laboured in the glare of a lamp hung to a tree, stowing away oxygen equipment which had proved unnecessary.

A sweating policeman switched off the stop beacon long enough for Jacky to back the car between an alien wagon and a human ambulance; then we all three jumped out and ran into the building.

We weren’t challenged until I’d led the way to the airlock of Block G. There, a girl – by her voice, though her airsuit made her shapeless – demanded what we wanted. When I explained, keeping to whispers because red lights signalled
EMERGENCY
over the sealed door, she told us bin Ishmael was directing operations from his own office.

At first he didn’t notice our arrival. He was completely absorbed in the scene depicted on a vision screen linked to the hospital’s chlorine ward: suited humans moving awkwardly around tables on which the naked Tau Cetians lay prostrate. When he did glance at us, his face showed no pleasure.

‘You got here, did you?’ he snapped. ‘Not before time! And who the hell may you be, incidentally?’ he added to Helga.

‘Helga Micallef. Bureau biochemist. I thought I’d be useful.’

‘Damned right. We need twice the staff we have on hand – with these creatures we’re just guessing! That’s not so much an operation’ – with a gesture at the vision screen – ‘as an experiment! Go down the corridor. The analysis lab is third on the right. They’re working on a haemoglobin equivalent in there, so we can give these poor beasts a transfusion. That sound like your line?’

Helga nodded and went out. As the door slid to, a face appeared on the phone, said something excited and incomprehensible about the interpreter, Shvast, and retreated out of range again.

‘That’s
something,’
bin Ishmael said, and heaved a deep sigh. ‘But we’ll need more than that before the night’s out.’

‘What actually happened?’ I demanded.

‘Somebody smashed one of the ventilator pipes on the outside of Vroazh’s room. Oxygen got in, and the poor devils were half burnt alive. You heard Gobind just now, saying they’ve managed to get Shvast back on his feet – he was farthest from the leak and got off lightest. Apparently he knows something about their first-aid, at least.’